Traditionally, phone calls and other audio conversations have been monitored for a variety of reasons. For instance, law enforcement authorities commonly monitor telephone calls using wiretaps and other similar technologies in the course of investigating criminal activity. There are many civilian uses of audio monitoring as well. Merely by way of example, many organizations wish to monitor sales and/or support calls in which their employees participate, for a variety of purposes, including training, verification, and supervision.
The public internet now provides sufficient bandwidth and responsiveness to support voice conversations using a variety of desktop applications installed on a client workstation. Multiple application programs are now able to conduct telephone-like or instant voice message communications over the public internet. These applications use a variety of encoding techniques for the transport of the audio streams.
The applications range from voice-enabled instant message applications, such as instant messenger applications, to soft-phone telephone replacement applications that provide a telephone infrastructure over the public internet using the internet protocol as the transport. Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) is but one well-known technology enabling such applications. In many cases, these applications include encryption technology, such that audio data is digitized and encrypted before transport between computers.
Traditional monitoring methods often are unable to accommodate these digital communications and, in particular, the increasing use of computer applications to support those communications.